As if he were in his living room, the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, appeared on Thursday at the Heat stadium in Miami, in front of a large group of American entrepreneurs to participate in the América Business Forum. There, surrounded by famous people such as Leonel Messi, the tennis players Serena Williams and Rafa Nadal or the entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, he assured that starting from December, with the majority in Congress, he will accelerate labor market reforms, lower taxes and toughen criminal laws.
This is the fourteenth time that the president has visited the United States and the first after his victory in the last legislative elections to renew Congress at the end of October thanks to the precious help of the Trump administration. The United States offered Milei a financial bailout worth $40 billion to prevent the peso from depreciating and calm markets. The aid was conditional on Milei’s victory in the elections. The support of the occupant of the Oval Office was decisive in overturning the complicated elections for Milei.
For this reason, the libertarian wanted to wink at his friend Trump, after the electoral defeat suffered by the Republicans last Tuesday: “Don’t be intimidated by some local results”, he proclaimed. Democrats won the mayoralty of New York and the state governments of Virginia and New Jersey. The New York socialist Zohran Mamdani was the protagonist of that day, winning the majority in the race to become mayor of the largest city in the United States.
The Argentine president underlined in his speech that “starting in December, Argentina will have the most reformist congress in its history” to approve the reforms that, in his opinion, the republic needs.
“We are talking about the modernization of work to update the conditions in which employment is generated, in order to increase the number of workers belonging to the formal system.”
Milei’s speeches are striking for their aggressive and polarizing tone and content, but also because the Argentine politician reads most of them with a poorly paced tone and with interruptions because he sometimes stumbles.
The president listed the reforms that his Government will face: “We are talking about deepening the path of deregulation and tax reduction. We are talking about reforming criminal laws so that crime is persecuted and punished, because there is no economic growth without defense of life. In Argentina whoever does it, pays. In Argentina there is no minimum amount of theft that is forgiven. They are all convicted”, he said in front of an audience of almost 10,000 people.
Milei also wanted to joke in front of Leonel Messi. “I am happy to be able to share the stage with one of our most illustrious athletes and the pride of all Argentines. And proof that sometimes I can compliment even a left-handed person.”
Milei gave a purely neoliberal speech praising the role of the market and denigrating the figure of the State. “Some admit that capitalism is the only way we can find to guarantee economic growth, but they argue that such growth has a very unequal impact on society. That is why, as they say, we would need the state to actively intervene in the market. The state, according to them, must intervene to guarantee equality between citizens and prevent monopolies or market failures from being created,” he said at the beginning of his speech. “If we admit that capitalism is a necessary evil, we will have already lost,” he continued, vigorously defending the free market.
The president’s speech comes hours after he announced that he does not intend to change the banding system that regulates the exchange rate, despite market pressure to allow the peso to float freely against the dollar.
